Do You Need A Meeting Makeover?

It’s Monday morning, your alarm sounds, and you roll over to look at your calendar for the week: on the docket, you’ve got seven meetings, one off-site event, and three phone calls with clients. It’s like there aren’t enough hours in the day, yet somehow you're expected to get all of this done. Sound familiar?

It’s a problem a lot of professionals have, but it’s completely avoidable. One easy way to get through the hump and start feeling less stressed on Mondays is to change the way you approach, run, and attend meetings.

We’re not saying that a meeting makeover will take you from 0 to 100, but we promise it will help you avoid bad meetings that are a total buzzkill. More often than not, they also feel like a waste of time and commonly people will walk out of a meeting having more questions than they came in with!

In the book, Meetings Suck? Make Them Better, Tom Searcy, the author, says: "keep meetings as short as possible; don’t overwhelm people with information and data; involve everybody; follow up.”

Sounds simple enough, right? So why is there workplace burnout and a lack of excitement or inspiration when people enter a meeting room? The upshot is that most meetings fail because the end goal is unclear and there isn’t a structure or agenda to follow.

Here are some tips on how to shape up your meetings:

1. Create a meeting agenda: This will help keep your meeting stay on track. The agenda can cover what needs to be discussed and accomplished, if the meeting is recurring (and, if so, how often does it need to take place?), and who the key attendees are.
2. Determine a purpose: What’s the goal of the meeting? One way to stay on the beam and be effective is to predetermine topics for discussion and outline themes that you’d like to touch on. This structure will also help guide the conversation and manage time more efficiently. Another great strategy is to assign blocks of time to each topic.
3. Share the meeting goals: We want to be productive and feel like our time is being well-spent. By sharing the meeting goals before the meeting you’re providing the people invited with information that will help them understand why they’re at the meeting. This way, they can also come prepared with their questions.

Wondering how to get started? Click here to start your free trial with Accelo. Let Accelo keep you on track and help make your meetings more fun!